Simple playground justice

For some years now I’ve been trying to observe U.S. politics in a rigorously detached, uncommitted way, as someone who is actually foreign to the United States. I do not think this comes naturally to any Canadian. We are all raised with the instinct that the U.S. constitution and American history are part of our heritage. The Declaration of Independence (For Slaveowners) and the Gettysburg Address stir our hearts. We think of the President (and not the Queen) as “leader of the free world”.

The election of Donald Trump has provided Canadians with the greatest test of their true foreignness yet. Americans, following American electoral rules, chose him to be the chief executive of the American government. He may be what they needed most; he may be a disaster whose horridity sloshes like hydrochloric acid onto us. But surely it is not for us to take this personally, either way. We do not have a proprietary interest in or a veto over American government.

Yet who has succeeded in maintaining sense, practicality, and balance in the face of Trump? Who writes about President Trump in a way that avoids stupefying “Trump bad!” and “Trump good!” pitfalls? And if you take emotional detachment from U.S. politics seriously enough, you begin to see that the Americans themselves could use a dose of it too. The country’s Thursday evening (Washington time) Tomahawk cruise missile barrage against the Syrian al-Shayrat airfield is bringing out the worst in everybody.

On Tuesday the Syrian government is said to have attacked an al-Qaida-held town from the air with nerve gas, almost certainly sarin. The attacks had many witnesses.

Turkish specialists examined soil samples taken from the site and confirmed the presence of sarin. Government aircraft had bombed a nearby hospital days before the gas attack, and returned hours afterward to blast a clinic treating victims, which is certainly suspicious. Pretty nearly every head of government you could name in the democratic world denounced the Assad government as perpetrators of a recognized war crime.

In reading that paragraph you might understandably have gotten hung up on the words “al-Qaida.” Maybe you feel that the global taboo surrounding chemical weapons is worth ignoring under circumstances like that. Unfortunately, a taboo with exemptions stops being a taboo pretty fast.

There is also a nonzero chance that the Tuesday sarin attack might turn out to be a hoax in the end. Islamist insurgents in Syria have occasionally been caught with chemical weapons of their own, ransacked from Assad’s pre-existing supply. (One might ask whose fault that is.) For the moment, however, the whole world seems to agree that Assad gassed Khan Sheikhoun. With the exception of Assad, who denies the whole thing, this includes absolutely everybody who would have a good reason to know.

The anti-Hillary hard left suggests that the presence of sarin at Khan Sheikhoun is an unfalsifiable McGuffin, much like the elusive weapons of mass destruction that brought about the second Gulf War. This is a hard proposition to buy. The sarin is a matter to be settled forensically. Western governments are in a position to know what planes dropped it and where they came from, and they insist that they do know. This provides some falsifiability that the prospect of stored WMDs doesn’t.

Assad’s clients, Iran and Russia, ask why Assad would use banned weapons in a war he is winning anyway. The answer might be Trump, who has spent months insisting he will not be baited into another Middle Eastern war. Spotty diplomatic signalling kills at least as many people as sheer belligerence (see: Gulf War I).

But disabling the airfield that had been the base for the gas attack seems consistent with Trump’s overall ideology of keeping the U.S. out of dumb wars. It was a unilateral push-button attack, but the leaders who wept over sarin victims have mostly registered approval. And the Russians, who had personnel at al-Shayrat, got plenty of advance warning — warning that was surely passed on to the Syrian armed forces.

This seems, in other words, like a careful, moderate — even sorta humanitarian? — response to a particular action that is supposed to be indefensible even in the persecution of terrorists. (If you don’t see a moral difference between chemical weapons and explode-y ones, that is a logically tenable position. It’s just not very popular.) There is no American proposal to depose or assassinate Assad: Trump spokesmen have bent over backward to avoid any such suggestion.

The cruise missile attack is simple playground justice — maybe ineffectual, maybe cruel, but definitely comprehensible. Rogue state uses airfield to violate sacred international rule: wreck the airfield. And maybe move on.

Naturally, almost every American hates this idea because of prior ideological commitments. Trump’s rightwing supporters see him as either acting in defence of al-Qaida or as betraying the let-’em-kill-each-other isolationism they were hoping for. Their disappointment is palpable. Meanwhile, the Hillary Party ignores the staggeringly Clinton-like nature of Trump’s action and accuses him of opportunism, inadvertently weakening the chemical-weapons taboo with every grumble. Trump’s building up his lousy poll numbers! By doing exactly what our candidate would have done, the crafty devil!